SpaceX, arguably the most legitimate of Elon Musk’s businesses, is set to have the largest initial public offering ever.

But even if you’re not someone whose heart goes aflutter at the prospect of a multibazillion-dollar tech deal, and even if you’re not some day-trader wannabe, you apparently get to care about SpaceX. A lot.

Why? Because if you’re a normie with a 401(k), you’re probably going to own SpaceX—even if you never buy a share.

A lot of retirement investing is done via nice, safe index funds, which track various stock indexes. Those big, fancy indexes—like the S&P 500 and Nasdaq—have rules for who’s included to keep your index fund largely free of meme stonks and fly-by-night garbage.

But those rules would have kept SpaceX out of the trading, and we can’t have that.

So Musk trundled up to the major stock indexes and said that he really, really wants to be included, even though the rules don’t allow it. Typically, companies must be public for at least a year before being included in index funds, precisely to protect those funds.

These index restrictions came out of one of the last overhyped investment cycles—the dot-com crash. After that, indexes made rules to ensure that stocks display profitability before joining the big boys.

Musk’s Tesla, for example, was publicly traded for about 10 years before it was added to the S&P 500.

But now, as Harvard Law School professor Jesse Fried explained to Fortune, “Index fund investors are forced to buy shares that they did not sign up for.”

While the S&P 500 declined to change its rules to accommodate Musk, Nasdaq did just the opposite, allowing SpaceX to begin trading on Friday. Hooray.

Now, while SpaceX is getting all of these breaks because it’s supposed to be the most valuable and successful company ever, it kind of isn’t.

By late 2021, it had accumulated so many losses that it got to offset its future income for as long as it takes to run out of the $3 billion in previously posted losses. And in 2025, it reported a net loss of nearly $5 billion—with only $18.67 billion in revenue—but somehow it will eventually be worth $1.7 trillion or something like that.

Thanks to Musk making up with President Donald Trump, the company does have a direct line to pretty much whatever government grift contract it wants, so that’s one income stream. And, of course, it already has several billions in contracts for launch provider gigs and can probably get even more—unless the Trump sons decide to get into the rocket business.

But no matter what, Musk—who under this arrangement retains more than 80% of the shares—will be just fine. Guys like him always are.

Meanwhile, enjoy having your retirement dollars get hoovered up by exploding rockets.

Published with permission of Daily Kos